Utah Promulgation: Mount Calvary Cemetery

A year and a half ago I wrote this post, and this one subsequently ending “Stranger In Rebellion” (until last December when I rebooted it). They were about an opportunity we had in Denver and all the fallout that came therein. Recently, I have been troubled by having many dreams about living in Utah; moving people I knew there, living in houses I have a history with, planning meetings with people, walking or driving the streets. It seemed a constant barrage and I began to wonder if I was being told something.

The same group of discipleship friends, the ones who told me they’d do everything to make me stay if they believed God was telling them it was wrong, gathered last Sunday night – and there was a similarity of conversation. I told one of my dreams and hope of interpretation. He told me that biblical interpretation of dreams was done by a person of God to someone who did not know God, so perhaps I should know my own. Another thing he said was that God seems to communicate to me in the going. In the possible move to Denver, I had to go there in order to feel God stopping me. Maybe this will be the same?

I had suggested in the past that I would like to take an all day/night drive to Utah with these friends, and, show them around a bit. The places I lived, went to school, restaurants I enjoyed, people I knew, are all a part of who I am that not one of them will ever know or understand. Who am I but where I came from? And now, just last week, my friend confirmed that perhaps we ought to do that, and have a good conversation on the way back about what God may be telling me. I delighted in the idea and began thinking of places to go. And then I had a great idea… Write about the places I would go. I like writing and I really like writing about my history, so why not begin a series about the places I’d take my friends. Most of these probably won’t be places we’d actually have time for, but it is more of a record, for good and bad.

I am writing this on “Former Stranger In Rebellion” instead of “Undeniably Mayo” because it seems right. This is where it all started, and this is where it may ultimately finish.

Mount Calvary Cemetery

The first place I’d like to write about is about the end. The place where all come to rest: a cemetery. You’re told to be quiet in church, quiet in school, quiet in the library. But a cemetery is a strange place. We need to be respectful. We need to be reverent. We need to be quiet. My Grandpa’s grave was located near the eastern most point of the entirety that is the Salt Lake Cemetery and more specifically, Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery. As a child, my family would visit his plot every Memorial Day, washing the bird poop off the tombstone with small tupperware containers filled at the little nearby shed. We’d walk up and down the hill in the hot sun getting enough water in the bowl and walk carefully back up trying not to spill too much so as to limit our excursions. As we stood around, waiting for my parents to feel whatever they were supposed to feel, I got a wondrous tickle deep down in my tummy. I wanted to run. What a perfect place to practice the dodge and weave, through the tombstones over the little trees, up the hill and back down. But that was all forbidden here. We were to be reverent. We were to be quiet. “Don’t step on the graves,” we were told. “Don’t lean on the tombstones,” we were reminded. We knew how to act, it was just hard to in such a beautiful environment.

Later, we’d walk up to the trees that lined the many roads within, to look at the graves of… my possible sister and brother, or my dad’s sister and brother? I never really quite understood, nor did I try to clarify, and it seemed mythical to me that I might have had two older siblings, or, that I might never existed. There were four of us kids and I was the third. If my parents were shooting for four, and the first two survived, would I exist at all? Those trees along that road held great reverence and quiet for me. The small inlaid stones were shabby and broken up, barely any writing on them at all. The memorial within the Mount Calvary Cemetery for those who were killed by abortion is larger and more intricate than all those little stones that marked the memory of those children who died very young. These small little tombs made me quietly sad, and yet filled me with a philosophy about who I was, and that I existed and they didn’t. What kind of God did we claim to know that left me alive and allow those others to perish? And why was there some sort of life there where we had to not walk upon them? Would they feel pain in the afterlife if we trod on their grave or shifted the stone? Sure, it is all respect for the living in that all this is done, but as a child we wonder why, and the smaller ones always held such sway over me.

I never knew my Grandpa, but buried there now is my Uncle Mike, his parents who are my Nana and Papa, subjects in many of my dreams. My dad is buried there too. They are all in and around the same modern mausoleum. Families divided in life by divorce, now united in death. These people define me. The place they now rest defines me. Here is where we shared tears when my Papa succumbed to old age, and too long after, my Nana. All the people who gathered at their home many a Sunday, now so geographically and emotionally and spiritually divided, coming together to mourn the loss of why we came to be. We will soon be gathered there, united in death. For death defines and succumbs to us all.

And yet, with the life I now live for eternity, do I go back and share this life, live it in such a way that they must see Christ in me? Or do I stay here? It seems that in the going I must find out.